The two rival orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, not contented with embroiling all Europe in discord, and angry strife, began soon after the decease of their respective founders, to contend with each other for precedence. And although the pontiffs of this and the following centuries used various means to compose and terminate these unseemly disputes, their attempts were fruitless; for these two great orders continued for many a long year to cherish this keen rivalry, and to hurl at each other the most bitter recriminations. They fought hard for the mastery in all the seats of learning in Christendom, but the most noted contest was that of the Dominicans with the university of Paris. Another prominent point of great controversy which long raged, was the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. It was the favorite doctrine of the Franciscans, and was always violently assailed by the Dominicans. The famous Thomas Aquinas argued in favor of the Dominican view of the question, and Duns Scotus, the Dialectician, taking up the Franciscan view of the doctrine, entered the arena of debate, which has continued to this day; for although the present pope Pius IX. has pronounced the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, the Dominican fraternity are unwilling to admit it. However it has now become an article of faith in the Romish church.
As early as 1256, when Bonaventura became the general of the Franciscans, he found they had begun to be faithless to their ungenial bride, poverty, and were struggling for a divorce. The affections of Francis had not survived in his followers. But under the prudent management of their new general, comparative tranquility was maintained during his life; but after his death, which took place in 1274, dissensions broke out with as great violence as ever. Indeed these mendicant, or rather satanic, orders caused the most violent contentions in almost every country of Europe down to the period of the Reformation. But all classes, both in Church and State, had to bear with their pride and arrogance, as they were the most faithful servants and satellites of the Roman See.
The following brief sketch from the pen of Matthew Paris, a Benedictine of St. Alban's, who wrote about 1249, will place before the reader the real character and ways of these dreadful pests of society. The picture is by no means overdrawn, though Matthew belonged to the old aristocratic order and might despise his new democratic brothers. Solitude, seclusion, the lonely cell, the private chapel, communication with the outer world sternly cut off, was the old order; the following is a sample of the new, and of what prevailed in England in the thirteenth century.
"It is terrible—it is an awful—presage, that in three hundred years, in four hundred years, even in more, the old monastic orders have not so entirely degenerated as these fraternities. The friars, who have been founded hardly forty years, have built even in the present day in England, residences as lofty as the palaces of our kings. These are they, who, enlarging day by day their sumptuous edifices, encircling them with lofty walls, lay up within them incalculable treasures, imprudently transgressing the bounds of poverty, and violating, according to the prophecy of the German Hildegard, the very fundamental rules of their profession. These are they, who, impelled by the love of gain, force themselves upon the last hours of the lords, and of the rich whom they know to be overflowing with wealth; and these, despising all rights, supplanting the ordinary pastors, extort confessions and secret testaments, boasting of themselves, and of their order, and asserting their vast superiority over all others. So that no one of the faithful now believes that he can be saved, unless guided and directed by the preachers or friars minor. Eager to obtain privileges, they serve in the courts of kings and nobles, as counselors, chamberlains, treasurers, bridesmen, or notaries of marriages; they are the executioners of the papal extortions. In their preaching they sometimes take the tone of flattery, sometimes of biting censure; they scruple not to reveal confession, or to bring forward the most rash accusations. They despise the legitimate orders, those founded by holy fathers, by St. Benedict or St. Augustine, with all other professors. They place their own order high above all; they look on the Cistercians as rude and simple, half laic or rather
peasants; they treat the black friars as haughty epicureans."
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